I run my hands through clay and it's like a living body: soft, wet, tactile, pliable. It speaks of Earth and Water; the way a river carves its bed, water forms the clay; of Air and Fire as it dries, as it burns. The primary elements of life coalesce in this process and I witness and participate in the transformation at each stage of development.
Working with clay requires the artist to alter their day-to-day relationship with time; so I watch and wait for the precise moment of when to build, model, carve, draw or fire. It's a dance between ideas and expression and this medium, which has its own inherent nature that I find always challenging and surprising.
My work evolves from an interest in the human form to portraiture to focusing on the origins, structures and cycles of organic life and its interrelationships.
The symbolic quality of the egg-as-creation has permeated art history, which in turn has influenced my work. In the Brera Madonna (1472) by Piero della Francesca, the Virgin is seated with child and a single egg hangs over the dome directly above the figures. In Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, (1480) his figures enter and emerge from egg-like shells, seeming to return to a womb-like existence. Brancusi, through the ovoid, expresses his symbolic approach to reality.
I group these primary forms so they relate to one another as families; suddenly they seem as family portrait. You can see the similarities, yet each is very much an individual. I like the idea of a still life, where a moment in time is captured. Like family portraits, my works, singularly or together, are a reminder of continuity, of this cycle of life that goes on and on.